A Catawba County pastor’s sermon in which he called for gays and lesbians to be placed in a form of concentration camp has spurred a protest planned at the church this Sunday.

A group calling itself Catawba Valley Citizens Against Hate says it plans a peaceful protest Sunday outside Providence Road Baptist Church, an independent Baptist church where Rev. Charles Worley delivered his controversial homily on May 13.

Worley’s sermon on Mothers Day has received more than 165,000 views on YouTube.

[…]

The church originally placed the video on its website, but it was removed late over the weekend. Providence Road Baptist’s website was not operating Tuesday morning, possibly due to the large number of people trying to access the site. But the video is still posted on YouTube.

It appears as if the May 13 sermon by Worley was aimed as criticism of President Obama’s announcement days earlier that he supports the right of gay couples to be married. Worley told his congregation that he couldn’t vote for a “baby-killer and a homosexual lover.”

After using Biblical passages that he said supported his argument, Worley then outlined a plan to put gays and lesbians in confinement.

The 71-year-old minister suggested building a large fence, 100 or 150 miles long, he said. He said lesbians would be put in one area, “and the queers and the homosexuals in another, and have that fence electrified, so they can’t get out.”

“Feed ‘em, and you know what?” Worley continued. “In a few years, they’ll die. Do you know why? They can’t reproduce.”

Some members of the congregation can be heard saying “Amen” in response to the pastor’s remarks.

I watched the video (you can too – below). The congregation did not say “Amen” in response to his concentration camp suggestion, but some did say “Amen” to some later remarks that also should not be said in a Christian church.

Longtime readers of this blog know my position on alternative forms of marriage, which includes gay marriage and polygamy. I am a proponent of the traditional one man one woman couple marriage, because I think that is the ideal setting in which to raise a child. For a healthy balance, I believe a child ideally needs both a mother and a father to raise it. Longtime readers of this blog also know how I despise it when liberal pastors, and politicians like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi grossly distort God’s word and try to use it to justify their support for gay marriage. I’ve said more than once that I believe the term “liberal Christian” is an oxymoron. I’ve also made it clear in prior posts that the church is not the place to be “politically correct” about any issue. The Bible is very clear as to how “tolerant” God is of any sin, including adultery, idolatry, homosexuality, etc. Which is to say He is not tolerant of it at all, and wants to you to ask for forgiveness for your sins and accept Him as your savior.

But I also despise it just as much – if not more so – when conservative pastors use the pulpit to preach about homosexuality in a way that goes against Jesus’ teachings. What Rev. Worley did is one of the worst things a pastor can ever do, if not THE worst: In short, he played God. In essence, what he said was (paraphrasing): “If I had my way about it, gays and lesbians wouldn’t be able to wait for God’s judgment at Heaven’s gate. I’d take care of them myself.” It was as if the pastor fantasized about gays and lesbians starving to death as a way for he himself to purge them from society.

This is highly offensive to me both as a conservative Christian and as a human being.

The way things work from a Biblical perspective, as Rev. Worley should know, is that all sins are equal in the eyes of God (with the exception of the sin of not believing) and that only God himself is the decider of whether or not you get to go to Heaven, or spend eternity you-know-where. God puts your fate in your hands: If you want to go to Heaven, you ask forgiveness for your sins and accept Him into your heart as your Lord and savior. But seeing as there is no perfect being outside of God, we’re all human and we are prone to sin even once we have asked Him into our hearts. And we are supposed to ask for forgiveness daily as part of the growth process associated with being a Christian.

That includes ALL sins, btw: Worshiping false gods, being envious of another man’s property, cheating on your spouse, homosexuality, etc. Any (sinning) Christian who has accepted the Lord as their savior will have to ultimately answer to God for their sins when their time comes. They do NOT have to answer to the Rev. Worleys of the world. Their fate is NOT in the hands of any person here on Earth, especially a false god like Worley. It is not up to any pastor to decide which sinners get to stay here on Earth and which ones should die right now and go to hell.

When I watched that video, outside of knowing right away how wrong he was from a Christian perspective, all I could think about was: What if there were families in the congregation who had gay family members or friends? What if there were gay congregants in attendance that day? And their pastor is telling them he’d shove them and/or their loved ones in a concentration camp and starve them to death so they couldn’t reproduce, if he had his way about it! In my 40+ years I have gone to many a traditional Christian church and I have NEVER heard a single pastor at any one of them talk the way Worley did about fellow sinners, and certainly never heard them express a desire to take matters into their own hands. Worley is most certainly NOT representative of most conservative pastors.

People go to church to learn about the word of God, and to mingle with other imperfect Christians who are also learning and trying to walk along a righteous path. Churchgoers rely on their respective pastors to help gently guide them along a Godly path via their expert interpretation and discussion of scripture. Pastors who veer wildly off course when it comes to God’s teachings and who, in effect, have appointed themselves as the deciders of who should remain here on Earth and who shouldn’t are doing a tremendous disservice to congregations hungry for knowledge of God’s word, not to mention to those who are lost and who are considering turning to a church but who get turned off when they hear vindictive sermon’s like Worley’s.

Preaching about sin in all forms, its consequences, God’s intolerance of it in all forms, and what will happen to you if you do not ask forgiveness for your sins and accept the Lord into your heart is both a moral and spiritual obligation for every Christian pastor. Preaching about and encouraging hatred and non-forgiveness towards other sinners mixed in with fantasies about personally purging them off the face of the planet, effectively “promoting” yourself to a God-like figure and decider, is most definitely NOT – not from the pulpit, not in the pews, not anywhere. I am not ashamed at all to be a conservative Christian, but I AM ashamed of Rev. Worley.

Donna Dewitt, the outgoing president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, is seen in this video bashing a piñata of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s face while Dewitt and her colleagues were at a retreat in Columbia, S.C. Saturday afternoon.

“Well I will say, she looks like a tough old girl here,” Dewitt says as she gears up to swing at the piñata.

She repeatedly hits the piñata, which bears the phrase “Unions are not needed, wanted or welcome in South Carolina” below Haley’s face. In her State of the State address this year, Haley said, “We’ll make the unions understand full well that they are not needed, not wanted and not welcome in the state of South Carolina.” Dewitt whacks the piñata down and continues to wail away at it once it’s fallen. Onlookers cheer her on, urging her to continue hitting the piñata.

Dewitt told ABC News she has no regrets about the incident and said there was “no ill intent” in what she was doing. Dewitt said her colleagues brought the pinata and were using it as a “memoir” of Haley’s words and actions towards unions in her time as governor.

“They made it and I would have played the game with them no matter it would have been pin the tail on the donkey with Nikki Haley’s face on it. I still would have played,” Dewitt told ABC News over the phone. ”There was no ill intent. We were certainly have a good time. I’m not mad or angry.”

“We’ve been the brunt of her comments now for two years and that’s what the whole thing was. She’s been whacking at us over the last two years,” Dewitt, who has been president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO for the past 16 years and will retire at the end of June, continued.

Do I think Dewitt was fantasizing about that REALLY being Gov. Haley she was beating down with that bat? No (and btw, if it were a man who had been doing the hitting, would NOW have stepped in? Nah.). Nevertheless, the imagery is disturbing – and dare I say a blatant violation of President Obama’s established New Tone Order where we’re all supposed to be civil to each other over tea and toast and not say or do anything that would make our fellow man feel compelled to go out and commit a violent act. Since the mainstream media happily went along with him in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by doing their level best not to use words or display actions that might “incite violence”, I’m sure they – along with liberal pundits and politicos – will be lined up to express their outrage and condemnation at the very thought that someone, especially a person in a position of power and influence like Dewitt, would symbolically bash the pinata head of her organization’s chief opposition – and a nationally known Governor at that.

The video has proved to be a big embarrassment for the national AFL-CIO, which reportedly wants the video taken offline (via Michelle Malkin). Not quite sure why the concern, considering much worse tactics displayed by the AFL-CIO in the past towards its political opposition. Maybe they’re just trying to clean up their act during a crucial election year. Unfortunately for Big Labor, their paper trail – nor their video trail – can be erased from history.

Cross-posted to Public Secrets, where I am helping out my co-blogger this week.

Gaffes of the Kinsleyan kind, wherein a politician accidentally speaks the truth. Over the last weekend, prominent Democratic figures have criticized the Obama campaigns mendacious attacks on Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Corey Booker, Harold Ford, jr., and former “Car Czar” Steve Rattner all came out with “knock it off” messages. (1)

In fairness, Booker at least was also attacking Republicans for raising the Reverend Wright issue again, but what’s important here is his (and others’) criticisms that feed the idea that Obama is way too far to the left for most Americans.

Which he is.

This was hugely embarrassing for Obama, since, especially in the case of Mayor Booker, a charismatic and popular moderate Democrat, the deviations from the party line badly undercut one of Obama’s key class-warfare campaign messages.

Footnote:
(1) And Booker has now paid the price for his “wrong thought,” being forced to abase himself on Twitter and on video to show his loyalty to The One. Where’s Andrei Vyshinsky when you need him?

PS: Posting will be very light from me for the next several days. Jury duty caught me.